Listening to Prestige 358: Memphis Slim

Bob Weinstock has tried, not always successfully, to give a showcase to talented but unheralded blues artists (Al Smith), and he's jumpstarted careers of performers who had slipped into obscurity (Lonnie Johnson). With Memphis Slim, it's a little different, Slim, who started to find success when he moved to Chicago in the late1930s, had sustained a recording career right through the 1950s, as a jump blues player and bandleader, and then reinvented himself as a folk blues artist, having recorded several successful albums for Folkways Records, including one with Pete Seeger.

Don't forget, in 1960 the blues revival had not yet happened, and there actually was not a huge demand for a label named Bluesville. Columbia's release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers would be released in 1961, and would start a trickle of interest that would grow exponentially as the British Invasion rockers embraced American blues and brought them back home.

The late 1950s were the fields of honor for a complex series of culture wars that made the War on Christmas look like a beach party with Frankie and Annette. In literature, the battle was between tbe academics and the beats--the raw and the cooked, in Robert Lowell's phrase. And in music, the center of all the battles was rock and roll. If you were over 35, rock and roll was an offense to Western civilization, especially if you were over 35 and white and a believer in racial purity. If you were a jazz fan, rock and roll wasn't subtle or sophisticated enough. If you were an ethnic folkie, it wasn't pure enough.

So where did that leave the blues?

It seems hard to believe, as central as the blues are now perceived in the American cultural wheel, but in this era the blues were lumped into the philistine camp. Muddy Waters--philistine then, revered icon now--sang about how the blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll, but back then the cultural guardians stood at the door, banishing both mama and baby as orphans of the storm.

The old guard basically rejected the blues because they weren't white enough. Their idea of the blues was Frank Sinatra singing about how, along with cigarettes lit one after another, you could get your first lesson in learning the blues. Or Dinah Shore singing about how the Southland gave birth to the blues. Nat "King" Cole was white enough until he crossed the unwritten lines. His 15-minute network TV show was canceled when no sponsor would touch it. Sammy Davis Jr. celebrated the new racial tolerance and the death of the old Stepin Fetchit stereotypes by essentially playing Stepin Fetchit to Frank

Sinatra.

The jazz snobs rejected the blues because it wasn't sophisticated enough, but certainly not on racial grounds. Oh, no? Are we so sure about that? Modern jazz had been created, developed, brought to its peak of artistry by black musicians. But there were whites involved in that development, too, and rhythm and blues was so black. If there were any white artists playing rhythm and blues in this era, I can't name them. When Esquire magazine included black critics in its annual jazz poll and suddenly more black artists were winning, Stan Kenton became the first white racist to yell "reverse discrimination." There was no Stan Kenton in rhythm and blues--except Johnny Otis, and he identified as black. There was no Stan Getz in rhythm and blues.

Actually, there was. Elvis Presley was the Stan Getz of rhythm and blues. But no one was going to accept that idea then, and I'm willing to bet that almost mo one who reads this will accept it now. This is not meant to be a knock on Getz. We all know that he and Desmond and Evans are great jazz musicians by anyone's standards. As were Teddy Kotick and Stan Levey and George Wallington and many others. But if there hadn't been white faces on at least some of the bandstands, the audience for modern jazz would have been a lot smaller. And if the Down Beat readership of the 1940s and early 1950s had been blacker, wouldn't Roy Milton and Paul Gayten and Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely have been showing up on some of those polls?

Clint Eastwood, in Bird, echoes this. Eastwood is a true jazz lover and a great champion of jazz, and I am perhaps the only person in the jazz community who actually liked Bird, for reasons irrelevant to this discussion. But Eastwood is a bit of an old school jazz snob too, and he does have Parker react incredulously and scornfully when he hears an old rival playing at the Apollo: "What is he doing playing rhythm and blues?" I have to believe that was Bird, and not Bird.

Folkies made the divide easier. If it wasn't played on acoustic instruments, it wasn't folk, and by the 1940s most blues musicians had gone electric. The exceptions there were a small group, mostly centered around New York and mostly recorded on Folkways, including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Lead Belly.

Lead Belly was the first, and one of Folkways' biggest stars, if such a term can be applied to a populist egalitarian folkie business like Folkways. Lead Belly is an unusual figure, because he's such an important figure in the history of the blues, and yet he's not really a part of the history of the blues at all. The blues as we know them, which means recorded blues, began in 1920 with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," which sparked the blues craze that lasted through the 1920s, until the depression meant that record companies had to cut back on their output, and the black performers got cut back first.

Lead Belly spent the 1920s in prison, so the decade in which his fellow songsters reinvented themselves as bluesmen passed him by. He was discovered by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were traveling the South looking for authentic Negro folk singers. Since the blues had achieved such a high level of popularity, the Lomaxes regarded it with the disdain an aficionado of classic rhythm and blues would feel for disco. Lead Belly, who knew a thousand songs (and could make up a thousand more) represented the music of an earlier generation--the pure folk music, in the minds of the Lomaxes.

When he got to New York, they found that he had no audience in the black community, He bombed at the Apollo. He represented a time and a culture that contemporary African Americans wanted to forget. So his audience was white leftists--the Folkways crowd. And there was a problem singing the blues to this crowd, because the blues is a music of hard-headed realism. This is the way life is, and don't expect it to be anything else. This was at odds with the philosophy of the white leftists, which was give us bread and give us roses--take it easy, but take it. So Lead Belly did what any good entertainer who wants to eat should do, and gave the people what they wanted. He started writing an singing songs about being from the home of the brave and the land of the free, and not wanting to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie. Others saw that market and decided to get in on it. Big Bill Broonzy, a jazz guitarist from Chicago, reinvented himself as an ethnic folk bluesman (he had the roots credentials for it) and sang a plea to get together and break up the old Jim Crow.

The explosion of popularity of electric blues, and the invention of folk rock,was to change the face of folk music in the mid-1960s, and all but the purest of the purists had to revise their definitions. Muddy Waters gave the nod, or perhaps the finger, to the folk establishment when his 1966 LP was called The Real Folk Blues.

Which brings us to Memphis Slim, who managed not only to make a living through all those years, but to defy categorization. He was a piano player, which put him in a different category from the guitar and harmonica players who congregated in Washington Square Park on Sundays, and who were most identified with the folkie sound, but he recorded for Folkways, as a solo act and with Willie Dixon, the achitect of the Chess Records rhythm and blues sound of Chicago. He put together a jump blues band callled Memphis Slim and the House Rockers which recorded for various R&B labels: He was recording for VeeJay and Folkways at the same time. And after 1962, when he moved full time to Paris, he became a staple of European jazz festivals, including the one at Montreux in Switzerland. His song, "Nobody Loves Me," which a reworking of an earlier blues,"Every Day  I Have The Blues," with the original title given back to it, became a hit for Count Basie and Joe Williams, then Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and is now considered a jazz standard.

For his first Prestige session, he formed a trio made up of electric guitarist Lafayette Thomas, whose mostly rhythm and blues background included a steady gig for several years with Jimmy McCracklin, and Prestige regular Wendell Marshall. All the songs are Slim originals, with songwriting credits given to Peter Chatman, which was not Slim's real name either, but his father's. He was actually John Len Chatman, but he used "Peter" for all his songwriting and publishing. Co-writer credit goes to Marshall on "Teasin' the Blues," which has some very nice piano-bass duet parts, and to Thomas on "Nice Stuff," which has a walking guitar solo reminiscent of Jimmy McCracklin.

This session and a later one for Prestige were both distributed across two albums, Just Blues and No Strain. Either would be an excellent introduction to Memphis Slim both as piano player and singer, or to anyone's blues library. Both were released on Bluesville.  "Darling I Love You" is marked in the session notes as "Rejected," but Slim must have liked the number, because he did it again in his November session, where Thomas' guitar was replaced by a harmonica, and that one became the first cut on No Strain.

Listening to Prestige 357: Johnny "Hammond" Smith

For his third Prestige album as leader, Johnny "Hammond" Smith stays with his regular bassist, George Tucker, and reunites with Oliver Nelson, on whose earlier date he contributed as a sideman. Art Taylor is back in town for a little Prestige action (he'd played the Lem Winchester session a few days previously), so he joins the session, as does Ray Barretto.

Nelson is content to play a supporting role here, not contributing any original compositions,  which is

 a little unusual, considering his reputation as a composer. He appears on three tracks--"Minors Allowed," "Rip Tide" and "Bennie's Diggin'." He plays a supporting role on "Minors Allowed," but he really steps out front with Walter Donaldson's "Rip Tide," an uptempo number with the energy and drive of an earlier era and the virtuoso dexterity of bebop. It really becomes his number, and Smith rides along with him, on a melody that sounds as though it were written for a soul jazz interpretation. Nelson leads off "Bennie's Diggin'." playing the head, but it becomes much more of a two-man show.

As for the works of other composers, "A Portrait of Jennie" was the title song for a 1940s movie, by an unlikely source for a sentimental movie theme composer. J. Russel Robinson began his career as a teenage ragtime composer in the first decade of the last century. He co-wrote songs with W. C. Handy, composed blues for the classic blues singers of the 1920s like Lucille Hegamin, and wrote the novelty classic "Who Is That Funny Reefer Man?" for Cab Calloway in the 1930s. He had some very big hits, like "Margie," and a lot of good songs. "Portrait of Jennie" had been recorded by Clifford Brown in 1955, but it didn't really become a jazz standard until later in the 1960s, after Smith had laid down his version. Smith keeps it short and to the point, at less than two and a half minutes it might have been a good candidate for a 45 RPM release, but such was not to be the case.

The single from this session was "The End of a Love Affair," by Edward Redding, about whom ad executive who just got lucky with one tune; his New York Times obituary lists his occupation as composer and lyricist, and they even credit him with a nickname ("Bud"), so he must have been known to someone, and they give a list of mid-level lounge singers (Julie Wilson, Jane Morgan) that he wrote for, but no other songs. Still, "End of a Love Affair" must have made him a wealthy man all by itself. It's been recorded by nearly every pop singer, lounge singer, jazz singer and cabaret singer, as well as by a host of jazz notables, not that being recorded by jazz notables ever made anyone wealthy. It's a good song, but more than that, it has a message that at least someone on any night in any cabaret is going to want to hear. Smith's version features a catchy rhythm set by Ray Barretto, and if I had been Bob Weinstock, choosing between this and "Portrait of Jennie" for my jukebox release, I too would have gone for "End of a Love Affair."

virtually nothing is known except that he wrote "The End of a Love Affair," music and lyrics both. He doesn't seem to have been a janitor or

The final standard is Erroll Garner's "Misty,"  and here feels no need to stay within the bounds of a melody everyone knows so well, so he opens up nicely on the improvisation. "An Affair to Remember" is not the treacly movie theme, but a Smith original, as is "Talk That Talk," a title that sends a message of nothing but soul jazz, and that's what Smith delivers. That it became the title track of the album shows that Weinstock knows the direction Snith is headed in.

Esmond Edwards produced. The release was on New Jazz.

Listening to Prestige 356 - King Curtis

Prestige has welcomed several of the rhythm and blues stars of the 1940a into the jazz mainstream (where they always belonged), and now the king of the rhythm and blues saxophone. If you were a rhythm and blues fan become jazz fan in the 1950s, you couldn't help but love King Curtis. His 45 RPM single of "Birth of the Blues" was one of my all time favorites, and it probably paved the way for me to fall under the spell of John Coltrane.

King Curtis is given the Prestige treatment, with Esmond Edwards producing and some major jazz figures making up an all star quintet, including Nat Adderley making his Prestige debut and Paul Chambers making and increasingly infrequent return to the label of many of his early triumphs.

But he brings the King Curtis sound with him. The other rhythm and blues veterans, like Hal Singer and Willis Jackson, bring a little nostalgia with them, remembering the R&B of the classic 1940s era. Newer players like Eddie Davis and Shirley Scott, are looking forward to the new soul era of the 1960s. Curtis, though he did begin his career with Lionel Hampton (and though he did play with Ornette Coleman in high school) is solidly right now. And why not? His sound, on countless records for Atlantic and other labels, defined the R&B saxophone of the 1950s. He explores a lot more possibilities here, but it's still the King Curtis sound.

The big difference between jazz and rhythm and blues of this era? Length. Jazz was an LP music, R&B was tailored to 45s, the jukeboxes, the radio DJs whose audiences were used to that three-minute format. That meant that an R&B instrumental number was built almost entirely around the main solo instrument, be it saxophone, guitar, piano or even harmonica. A jazz tune can easily, with extended improvisation and with solo space given to every member of the ensemble, go eight to ten minutes or longer. Obviously, this creates a whole different dynamic.

The other players here are a mixed lot. Nat Adderley pulled a stint with Lionel Hampton, but his career was almost entirely within the modern jazz idiom, In that, he finds plenty of common ground with Curtis. He turns out to have been a good choice. Wynton Kelly has a wide-ranging musical vocabulary, and he works well here.
The most interesting work on the session is turned in by Chambers and Oliver Jackson, who seem to have come prepared to have a good time. Chambers does some of his signature virtuoso solos, including a very strange and haunting bowed bass at the end of "In a Funky Groove," but he also does some unusual stuff, particularly on "Da Du Dah," and Jackson just doesn't hold anything back.

I'm guessing "Little Brother Soul" is Nat Adderley composition, but it may be a Curtis original paying tribute to Cannonball's little brother. Aside from "Willow Weep For Me," the others are all Curtis originals, and he shows some nice range.

The album was called The New Scene of King Curtis. It was released on New Jazz.

Listening to Prestige 355 - Lem Winchester

Just when I had despaired of ever seeing another bad pun in a jazz composition, Lem Winchester comes to my rescue with "Lem 'n Aide" from this session, and better than that, we have the album's title, Lem's Beat, a sly reference to Winchester's previous career as a police officer in Wilmington, Delaware.

Lem's aide on this session is Oliver Nelson, who wrote three of the tracks, played saxophone and is credited as arranger. Both Nelson and Winchester were to have lives cut short, and not attained the kind of reputation that longer lives might have afforded them. It's good they found each other for this session.

Curtis Peagler of the short-lived but interesting Modern Jazz Disciples rounds out the front line. Peagler mostly faded into obscurity with the rest of the disciples, but the little that he did put on record is worth attending to. He's joined on two tracks by a fellow Disciple, Billy Brown. The piano duties on the other tracks are handled by Roy Johnson, about whom I can find no other information. Perhaps he was someone Winchester knew from his early days in Delaware. The rest of the rhythm section is Wendell Marshall, ubiquitous, and Art Taylor, not heard from in a couple of months, both more than welcome.

Oliver Nelson, already recognized as one of the finest composers of his era, contributes three tunes, the melodic "Eddy's Dilemma," the riffy "Lem & Aide," and "Your Last Chance," which combines the best of both worlds. Nelson becomes the dominant voice on these, but Winchester is a strong partner, and Peagler proves to be an excellent choice as second saxophone, falling right in with Nelson's ideas and bringing his own voice to them.

Roy Johnson's contribution is "Lady Day," the shortest cut of the day at 2:51, haunting and moving, with Winchester and Peagler taking center stage.

"Just Friends" is back, and it's good to hear such a different take on it. And let's trust that they were all friends, and needed no persuasion to be so, since the other outside composition is the movie theme "Friendly Persuasion." My guess...Roy Johnson was a friend of Lem's from the old days? And from the compatibility of Nelson and Curtis Peagler, and the fact that piano duties were shared between Johnson and Billy Brown, maybe the disciples were old friends of Oliver's? And by this time, producer Esmond Edwards had to be pretty tight with Wendell Marshall and Art Taylor. "Friendly Persuasion" is a sentimental ballad by Dmitri Tiomkin that Winchester deals with by not trying to avoid the sentimentality, and it's a good choice. A nice number for friends to pitch in on.

Lem's Beat was a New Jazz release.

Listening to Prestige 354 - Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Shirley Scott

What a difference Ray Barretto makes to a session!

Of course, it's not just him. Davis and Scott blow the cathedral ceilings off Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs shrine, and if you ever wondered if Moodsville meant "you can sneak this record on for your Jackie Gleason fans, and maybe they won't notice it's jazz," you can forget that right now. This is a session that left me thinking two things, and two things only. One, I'm so glad I'm a jazz fan and I get to experience music like this, and two, How is it possible that I never heard this before?

So pardon me if I'm speechless for a while, as I just listen to the music a few more times, all the way through.

OK, I'm back. Still amazed. Eddie Davis plays right on that sweet spot at the cusp of bebop and rhythm and blues. Ray Barretto is the musician's musician on congas, equally adept at playing Latin or bebop, but sensitive as he is to the boppish tempos of Mr. Jaws, this one has that Latin edge all the way through. And Shirley Scott is the perfect accompanist to Davis's bebop and the perfect spur to send the music into the next decade. My God, she could play! And she was so inventive.

The Moodsville album which uses the bulk of this session's material begins with two numbers from an earlier trio session. Then it starts afresh with "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss," by Lee Morse, a singer of whom I was previously unaware, but she was a big deal in the 1920s, matched only by Ruth Etting for record sales.

Curious, I listened to Lee Morse's recording of "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss."  She's a very nice singer, and in those days she had her own band, which included Eddie Lang and a couple of new kids named Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. She puts a twist of yearning into the song, Davis hears it a bit differently.

It's interesting that he hears it at all. Morse kept performing through the late 1940s, but by the end or th3 1920s alcohol had pretty much destroyed her. Her jump to superstardom was supposed to come in 1927 with the starring role in a Zeigfield musical, but on opening night she was too drunk to go on, and her place was taken...by Ruth Etting. Etting's signature songs, like "Love Me or Leave Me" and "Ten Cents a Dance" (should have been Morse's; it was from that musical) have become standards, but I can find no other version of "Give Me a Goodnight Kiss."

Davis takes the first solos at a good but not breakneck tempo, abetted by some tasty work from Wendell Marshall and Ray Barretto, nicely completing each other's thoughts, and some always ingenious comping from Scott. When she comes in about two thirds of the way through for her solo, you realize that as good as Davis has been, this is what you've been waiting for. She builds up to a series of crescendos, and then Davis comes back for a final version of the head, again with Barretto and Marshall, and with a sweet, yearning quality that's reminiscent of Lee Morse.

This is the beginning of an eclectic set. They follow with Frank Loesser's "Moon of Manakoora," originally sung by Dorothy Lamour in a movie (and yes, she was wearing a sarong). It's had a number of pop recordings, and a few jazz interpretations, starting with Benny Carter and also including Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Rowles. Davis, Scott and Barretto get pretty seriously into it, eleven minutes worth, Barretto starting the game with a challenging and seductive rhythm.

"Just Friends" was composed by John Klenner, who is not known for much else, but pretty nearly

everyone has recorded "Just Friends," with the honors probably going to Charlie Parker with strings. This version would have to be right up there, though, with the three principals spurring each other to new heights. "Speak Low" has a haunting melody by Kurt Weill, sensitively handled by Davis with Barretto providing a rhythmic counterpoint. Davis gets wilder as the number progresses, and by the time Scott joins in all bets are off, although Davis comes home to the melody at the end.

"I Wished on the Moon" was written by Ralph Rainger, who had an impressive career before dying young in a plane crash. It finishes up the album, but was the first tune to be recorded that day.

The Moodsville release was entitled Misty. and hit the shelves in 1963. The odd tune out for the day was Cole Porter's "From This Moment On." It was added to a 1967 release, Stompin'.

Listening to Prestige 353 - Shirley Scott

Most of this session went on a Moodsville album, along with four songs held back from an earlier date.

She had a new bass player for the date in George Tucker. Tucker had some experience accompanying organs, having played on Johnny "Hammond" Smith's two Prestige albums. She continued with Arthur Edgehill on drums.

She is perhaps a little more subdued for Moodsville. Musically, she continues to reward the listener, but with a more limited palette of sound. Rather than

seeking out new possibilities of electronic sound, she stays close to the sound of a piano, the percussive individual notes stretched just a little by the electronic sustain of the Hammond. So it is in its own way an experiment with the different possibilities of her instrument. As one of the most popular jazz musicians of the decade, she recorded a lot, both with Prestige and Blue Note, and later Impulse and Atlantic, and she was always going to find a way to make it interesting.

For the four Moodsville songs, she picked two Rodgers and Hart standards, "Spring is Here" and "I Didn't Know What Time it Was," and you can't go wrong with Rodgers and Hart. The other two are also ballads, and equally romantic, but from composers with interesting stories. "I Thought I'd Let You Know" was composed by Scott's fellow Philadelphian Cal Massey in an uncharacteristically romantic mood; Massey was to become best known for his uncompromising political stance on civil rights, which caused him to be blacklisted by some of the large corporate record labels.

Jimmy Davis (not the Louisiana governor who wrote "You Are My Sunshine") is best known for written for Billie Holiday which has become a classic, but his story is more than that, and worth remembering. Drafted in 1942, he refused to report to a segregated army and demanded that either be exempted or seconded to the Canadian army, which was integrated. When both demands were rejected, he chose prison over a segregated armed forces. He did eventually agree to join the army, and was sent to France in 1945 with a musical unit. He fell in love with the country, and eventually, like many other African-American musicians, became an expatriate.

"Lover Man," a song

"Bye Bye Blackbird" was held for a 1961 release, Shirley's Sounds; "Autumn Leaves" and her own composition, "Bridge Blue," had  wait until 1966 and Workin'..

She also cut two tunes, "Crazy Rhythm" and "The Things You Are," with Earl Coleman. They were never released. Too bad. Coleman really never got his due.

Esmond Edwards produced.